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It's possible that when you saw it at the Smithsonian it didn't have the white stripe.
A plain blue canvas probably wouldn't get more than a few million.
Having a gifted artist add the white stripe in just the right place is what got it up to $43.8 million at auction.
I think I would have made the white stripe horizontal, but that may have ruined it.

I would have been far more bold and gone diagonally, but not simply corner to corner, a precise 37.5 degree angle from upper right towards lower left. That would have pushed this well over the 100 million mark. But alas, I was not consulted. Their loss.

Ed Miller, Calgary, AB
2008 K1200GT, 2009 F800GS
I can't wait to retire and have a fixed income. The one I have now is always broke.

And I see that a portrait of actress Bea Arthur (remember "Golden Girls"?) just sold for a more modest $1.9M. The amount was more modest, not the picture which is Bea in her birthday suit. I'll have nightmares for years...

I have owned several motorcycles. I have owned several boats. I just got back from 10 days sailing in the BVI's. Flying to Denver at the end of the month. RA Rally in June, BMWST Rally in June, PNW in July. Boundary Waters canoe trip in August. NW Arkansas on the bike in September.

Maybe this story would have created less consternation if the painting had been done by Picasso, or another big name painter. I don't think many people outside of the art world have heard of this guy - I hadn't. And a wiki search reveals that Mr. Newmann is also a big name painter.

Who am I to complain how others spend their disposable income? sibud

And some of our neighbours' tongues might be wagging if we brought home that green frame Ducati that went for $100,000 at the Las Vegas auction recently. I wonder how much a restored R32 would cost?

Last edited by Rinty; 05-17-2013 at 10:22 PM.

Rinty

"When you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there."

I would have been far more bold and gone diagonally, but not simply corner to corner, a precise 37.5 degree angle from upper right towards lower left. That would have pushed this well over the 100 million mark. But alas, I was not consulted. Their loss.

Here we go... some people are always "looking for an angle"

"If I had my life to live over, I'd dare to make more mistakes next time...I'd relax,I'd limber up... I would take fewer things seriously...take more chances... take more trips...climb more mountains...swim more rivers...eat more ice cream." Jorge Luis Borges at age 85.

I have owned several motorcycles. I have owned several boats. I just got back from 10 days sailing in the BVI's. Flying to Denver at the end of the month. RA Rally in June, BMWST Rally in June, PNW in July. Boundary Waters canoe trip in August. NW Arkansas on the bike in September.

This is fine art.
The 'Blue' is particular, as is the 'White'. Simply calling those colours blue and white is a travesty, and an insult to the artist.
Personally I would not have paid that much, I have other priorities; to ridicule the connoisseur who managed to procure the piece does more to point out deficiencies in your characters than it does to show shortfalls in his or hers.

BTW
Sotheby's auctioned this piece.
Barnett Newman was the artist.

Hope that makes you think

That is a lot of MONEY. I would bet that they artist was lucky if he got 10% of the selling price.

Art and the discussion thereof is a tricky topic. As a small child when visiting in laws I spied a mag showing splatter dribble painting. Much later in life actually went back and tried comprehend how this, the American breakout of the modern era, happened. It took afew years of reading, looking and many evenings sitting at lectures, to get a handle on "The Triumph of American Painting", (Sandler). In the end it's less about painting, the object itself or whether today we could throw an old can of paint and get rich.

It's more, IMHO, about what promoters/critics of that era said/wrote/hyped about the objects, and the timing of all this frenetic art activity mid twentieth century in America, and now it's position in the long history of humans making objects/art.

Enter, a piece of this activity, a big blue piece, onto the auction scene. and we all know what can happen at an auction. Actually, IMO, it's very exciting to watch. Don't really care, as others have said, how much cash anyone has or what they want to spend it on. Gratitude is the beginning of happiness, others can grapple with envy. Back to art.

I suspect one of the objects of greatest enjoyment for Pollack was his green Olds convertible with its 303 ci v8. did the "great American" abstract painters really knew what they doing, or lived to profit from their work? some did and it, abstraction, can never happen again, and that's what lures fortunes to grab a piece whenever it comes up for sale. It's a piece of an era that catapulted American painting ahead of what previously had been happening on the continent. Two cents only, it's been fun.